🇮🇳 🤖 Reality check at India’s AI summit

This week saw India launch a summit on artificial intelligence with much fanfare. Unfortunately, the news has been full of gaffes around the event - scroll below to find out why. Reading updates about the event reminds me about Sri Lanka’s own National AI expo last September, where the discussion revolved largely around the need to build up Sri Lanka’s digital infrastructure in the first place rather than on how exactly the country planned to invest in AI so it could contribute USD 1.5 billion to the economy as the government planned (no pressure, Mr President and co, we only have a looming debt crisis to contend with). On that note, I’ll take this opportunity to ask you, dear reader, to sign up to our Patrons programme and support our work, so we can bring you the real news instead of the bland PR, week-on-week.

To contribute more, visit himalmag.com/support-himal.

This week in Himal

From left: Mohan Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, Matrika Prasad Koirala, Phanishwar Nath Renu, King Tribhuvan, B P Koirala, Subarna Shamsher Rana, King Mahendra

Ratik Ashokan translates Hindi writer Phanishwar Nath Renu’s ‘Nepali Kranti Katha’ a rare account of the 1950-1951 Nepal Revolution, the autocratic Rana regime and the first democratically elected prime minister of Nepal, B P Koirala.

This Monday, we co-hosted a translators masterclass featuring Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation winner Sana R Chaudhry, online now in case you missed it!

Also read: In Bangladesh, a centrist reset and an Islamist breakthrough

Also read: Irfan Habib & Harsh Mander on the decay of socialism and secularism in India

This week in Southasia

Hype vs reality at India’s AI Summit

Cartoon of Narendra Modi arm in arm with a businessman in a suit while a robot labelled AI summit holds off an ordinary person from walking in - representing India's mess ups at the AI summit that they hosted — Gihan de Chickera

On 16 January, New Delhi hosted an international summit on artificial intelligence. While the event kicked off with much fanfare, it struggled to match its lofty rhetoric. Summit attendees, including the heads of Indian AI startups, reported being unable to enter the venue for long hours, poor internet connectivity and no digital payments, and in one case having patented wearable technology stolen during security sweeps. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was in attendance, but he had other, bigger business on the trip: selling USD 40 billion of Rafale fighter jets and maritime patrol aircraft.

While the event was touted as an opportunity to showcase India’s homegrown AI solutions, including from its army, less discussed was the systemic exploitation of low-paid Indian workers who manually categorise the vast data needed to train AI tools. There was also strategic silence around news that hundreds of India’s AI startup founders are moving to the United States to have better access to users, talent and funds. And the event came under added scrutiny for inviting the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to deliver a keynote speech despite recent revelations linking him to the notorious sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein after the latter’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. Gates was hastily scrubbed from the list of participants, and cancelled his keynote speech due to backlash. Add to that the fiasco of an Indian university passing off a Chinese-made robot as the result of its own research.

As with many of the Indian government’s efforts on the global stage, reality proved less rosy than PR.

Himal Fiction Fest 2026. Deadline: 1 April. Submissions now open!

Elsewhere in Southasia:

Sri Lankan parliament votes to eliminate lawmaker’s pensions, fulfilling campaign promise by the National People’s Power government in the wake of the 2022 economic crisis
Multiple explosions and police standoff with militants leave 12 people, including a child, dead in Khyber Pakhtunkhwah, Pakistan
Iran rescues 300 Afghan migrants who entered the country in cold weather and plans to hand them over to Afghan authorities, UN flags impending humanitarian crisis due to large influx of refugees into Afghanistan
Sri Lankan leftist Lanka Sama Samaja Party leader Tissa Vitarana, key contributor in 2006 report to develop a political solution to Sri Lanka’s civil war, dies at age 91
Taliban government releases three Pakistani soldiers detained since October 2025 due to Ramadan, despite ongoing tensions between the two countries
Ten-month-old baby from Kerala, India becomes youngest organ donor in the state after losing her life in a car accident, saves four people
Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing visits Sagaing region, largely held by anti-junta groups, signalling plans for military operations in the region
Founder of Indian news website Newsclick, Prabir Purkayastha, fined INR 1.84 billion rupees (over USD 20 million) by Indian intelligence agency for violating Foreign Exchange Management Act
India’s National Green Tribunal greenlights large infrastructure projects on Great Nicobar Island, despite reports of clearfelling trees and pushback from Nicobarese indigenous people
Myanmar expels East Timor representative over war crimes case lodged against junta
Maldives’s President Mohamed Muizzu calls for public referendum on holding presidential and parliamentary elections concurrently